Following a link from an ad on The Show, I had a look around PhotoShelter on Friday, and decided to apply.

I submitted ten images, but didn't actually regenerate them to match their requirements. After reading their standards later, they should have been saved with AdobeRGB, not sRGB, should have been output at a higher JPEG quality level, shouldn't have been sharpened, and shouldn't have had their colours played with as much as I did.

I had a couple of days off this week, so I walked with Sam as she was going to work, then walked back home. We walked around by the River Exe on Thursday morning, to kill a little time before Sam needed to be at work. Someone had disposed of a rusted old moped by parking it in the river.

I can never resist photographing rusty things.

A couple more:

Sam and I volunteer at the local Blue Cross animal shelter, giving the animals some social time. Yes, they need people to volunteer to walk dogs and play with cats and kittens.

This weekend, we were having big problems with PigPog, so we didn't have as long as we usually do. We decided to skip the dogs, and just do the cats. The cats had recently had some play time, so they asked if we'd mind playing with kittens instead.

Well, alright then. If we must.

The first bunch were lively, and wanted to explore everything. Some of the others didn't want to get out of bed, so we had to crawl on the floor to get to them. All good fun, though. More pictures:

Once I started to build up a bit of a collection of fountain pens, I started to want a way of displaying them. A nice old wooden CD rack made a good display stand for ink bottles, and Sam's mum bought me a little glass cabinet for a few more bottles to go in. The pens, though, still lived in a leather pen wallet, hidden from view.

I recently bought a bookcase from a colleague (thanks, Sarah!) We only had a half-plan of using it for extra storage in the bedroom. Then, when we reached Tiverton market, after yesterday's walk, there was a cabinet maker's stall. There on the stall was a pen cabinet, for £27, which seemed like something of a bargain. I bought it.

I then realised that with a bit of moving of shelves, it could fit nicely into the bookcase, with plenty of room for other things. So here it is:

We needed to do a bit of shopping in the market, so we drove into town rather than walking. Since we still wanted a walk, we headed in to West Exe after brunch at Mad Hatters.

We found a fairly sizable park we didn't know about, with a bright colourful playground...

Update3: The problem never stayed away, and got worse. I tried upgrading to Drupal 6.x, but our hosting has such an old version of MySQL that we can't run Drupal 6.x. I then tried a fresh installation of Drupal 5.x, fetching the current version of every module we need, and enabling things gradually. So far, things are pointing at the search module again, but I only stopped the problems by deleting the search module and emptying all the search tables. Disabling the module didn't stop lots of locked processes updating the search_index table. We'll see how things go from here, then.

Update2: Running without the Image module didn't fix it - it happened again. We now have the Image module enabled again, and a few other modules disabled. PathAuto is included in this lot, as I've heard it can have performance issues with a lot of paths (we have over 1,000). If things stay stable this way, I'll probably try updating PathAuto to the latest version and enabling it again.

Update: This turned out not to be the case at all. The next batch of images I uploaded were ok, but the next after that caused the same locking problems without the search module running. I'm just going to abandon the image module for now, and maybe have another go when we upgrade to Drupal 6.x.

A GoogleFood post - there's probably nothing of interest here, unless Google has brought you to this page when you're trying to work out why Drupal keeps making your server crash, run very slowly, etc, after you've added a batch of images.

Another day, another walk. Not as long as yesterday's BigWalk, but not bad. We started by heading into the town centre again, taking a cut along a narrow sloped path that brings us from the bottom of Canal Hill to the multi-storey car park.

I love the telegraph poles and electrical system here in Devon. It all seems very unplanned.

At the bottom of Canal Hill, I took a time-lapse video of the roundabout - one minute of the roundabout in a three-second video:

Well, anyone who visits reasonably often has probably already noticed that we redesigned again a couple of weeks ago. I've finally put aside my dislike of fixed-width designs, and used one. It's based on the 960.gs implementation, turned into a simple Drupal theme.

The choice of fonts was aided a lot by a couple of articles:

• 8 Fonts You Probably Don’t Use in CSS, but Should
• Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows

Putting these two together, we've picked fonts that should display well on all major platforms, and fail over to something reasonable on anything else.

We're still experimenting a little with the ads. Just a little while ago, we replaced the big ad block in the top left with a random photo. We like the money they bring, but we don't want to make the site unpleasant to read, either.

Hope you like it - if not, I hope it's at least readable and not too objectionable.

We went out for a nice long (for us, anyway) walk yesterday, starting with our usual Saturday brunch at Mad Hatters. After ordering, we went to sit out in the garden, and wondered if we should have gone for the duck - it was very fresh.

It was drinking from the water bowl left out for dogs.

Mmm. Coffee. And Doppio. A good start to the day.

When I bought my new Canon G9 recently, I thought it was kind of cute that it could do time lapse photography, but I didn't think it was something I'd ever really use. I've actually ended up using it quite a bit.

It's just like shooting video, except it only takes one frame per second. The result is a high-speed video, compressing minutes of reality into a few seconds. It's almost the opposite of photography - in photography, you're chopping reality down to a single instant. Here, you're taking a chunk of time, and compressing it down to not much more than an instant.

Here's Sam climbing the steps at the bottom of Tiverton park: